A barely credible denouement mercifully brings to a close this ambitious but tedious tale.
Canadian Gunn’s American debut is the story of an anthropologist searching for the mother who abandoned her—in a mix of overwrought plot, deep thoughts, and anthropology.
Kate is in her early 30s, and her life is a mess: she’s been married, divorced, had numerous affairs, an abortion. She drinks too much, pops pills, and has been suspended from her teaching job because of inappropriate behavior. And naturally it’s not her fault—mother, father, stepmother are all responsible. When she learns that her stepmother Elaine has drowned, Kate finally goes back home to Twisp, Washington, which she’d left at 15, going to Canada to live with her aunt Rose when her father, Joe, married Elaine. She’d recently divorced Ray, an artist, whose teenaged daughter Patti also lives in Twisp with her own baby and husband Trevor. Once home, Kate learns that Elaine, who’d urgently wanted to talk to her before she died, turns out to have been the elder sister of her mother, Iris. Between fights with her father and bouts of heavy drinking, Kate looks through Iris’s possessions, examines old photos for clues, and places ads asking for information about Kate’s mother, who’d also had a son she put up for adoption. While Kate is busy investigating, Patti suddenly disappears, leaving her baby behind—and searchers find her body in a ravine. Patti’s disappearance and murder clumsily hint at possible parallels to Iris’s disappearance, as do the anecdotes about tribes—the Anasazi, Ik, and Tasaday—that, by becoming extinct, literally disappeared. Kate meets a woman who knew Iris when she ran off to India with her drug-addicted lover Danny. She also learns that Iris was hospitalized on her return when her behavior became erratic at home. Memories from the past return, especially the snowy day when Iris put four-year-old Kate outside in the snow while she met up again with Danny. It was the last time Kate saw her.
A barely credible denouement mercifully brings to a close this ambitious but tedious tale.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55192-486-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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